Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2610.29030

PHD-Hand: A Printable Humanoid Dexterous Hand with Linkage-Driven 3-DOA Digits

Neel Adwani·Muhaiminul Islam Akash·Saffia Ouali·Ethan Liu·Cong Wang
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Currently, dexterous humanoid robot hands are widely considered the final hardware bottleneck that hampers generalist robots from physically assisting people at home and work. As conventional tendon-driven designs suffer from high cost, demanding maintenance, poor reliability, and short durability, alternative linkage-driven designs have increasingly gained attention. Despite their potential to avoid the weaknesses of tendon-driven hands, integrating multiple degrees of actuation (DOA) in a single digit with linkage drivetrains is a challenge for design and fabrication. Only a few studies have managed to present functional humanoid hands that are completely linkage-driven and have at least three DOAs per digit without compromising actuator placement and other design preferences. Our work introduces a new linkage-driven hand featuring a unique flexure hinge. Together with elastic drive rods made of spring steel, the linkage drivetrains are significantly simplified. Unlike other linkage-driven designs of similar dexterity, our design does not require many miniature moving parts. As a result, the hand can be fabricated easily with a budget 3D printer. This not only significantly lowers the barrier to entry for using and developing dexterous humanoid robot hand functions, but also allows the hands to be sized much closer to regular human hands. The design offers desirable kinematic advantages as well. A prototype is evaluated for grasping and object manipulation. In addition, this paper presents our latest findings on kinematics and control of the hand.

Explore related subjects

cs.ROcs.AI

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Neel Adwani, Muhaiminul Islam Akash, Saffia Ouali, Ethan Liu, Cong Wang. 2026-10-21. PHD-Hand: A Printable Humanoid Dexterous Hand with Linkage-Driven 3-DOA Digits. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29030

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

AgriVLN: Vision-and-Language Navigation for Agricultural Robots

Agricultural robots are serving as powerful members across a wide range of tasks, nevertheless, they are still heavily relying on manual operations or railway systems for movement. In contrast, Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) enables navigating robots from starting points to target positions following natural language instructions, having shown strong performances across various domains. However, none of the existing benchmarks or methods are specifically designed for agricultural robots. To bridge this gap, we build our A2A benchmark, which consists of 1,560 episodes across 6 classes of agricultural scenes using the step-by-step format for instructions and the continuous environment for actions. We evaluate several existing state-of-the-art VLN methods on A2A, then we observe that they perform well on short instructions while perform poorly on long instructions. To alleviate this phenomenon, we design our STL module, which decomposes a complex instruction into a list of simple subtasks, thereby assisting the decision-maker to focus on the current short subtask rather than the entire long instruction at any time. We integrate STL into the NavGPT backbone to propose our AgriVLN method, achieving a sufficient improvement on SR from 0.33 to 0.47 with a slight sacrifice on NE from 2.76 m to 2.91 m. We further implement the ablation studies and the case study, discussing the effectiveness and limitations of AgriVLN on different subtask quantities and scene classes. Repository: https://github.com/AlexTraveling/AgriVLN.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

HEHA: Bounded Suboptimal Planning for Constrained Routing and Its Use in Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Exploration of Unknown Environments

This paper considers the path planning problem for autonomous exploration of an unknown environment using multiple heterogeneous robots such as drones, wheeled, and legged robots, with different capabilities to traverse complex terrains. A key challenge there is to intelligently allocate the robots to the unknown areas to be explored and determine the visiting order of those areas subject to traversability constraints, which leads to a large-scale constrained multiple hamiltonian path problem (mHPP) that needs to be quickly and iteratively solved every time when new space is explored. To address the hallenge, we propose HEHA (Hierarchical Exploration with Heterogeneous Agents) using a recent hierarchical method that decomposes the exploration into global planning and local planning. The major contribution in HEHA is its global planning, where we propose a new routing algorithm RCH (Routing with Constraints and Heterogeneity) that can quickly find bounded sub-optimal solutions for mHPP to minimize the maximum path length (i.e., makespan) among the agents subject to traversability constraints. Additionally, the local planner in HEHA also considers heterogeneity to avoid repeated and duplicated exploration among the robots. The experimental results show, in the presence of heterogeneous traversability, our RCH can solve mHPP with up to 47% smaller makespan than several baselines, and HEHA can reduce the exploration time by up to 30% compared with existing approaches.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Onboard UAV State Estimation for Fast Flights Without External Localization Systems: A2RL Drone Racing Finalist Approach

Fast flights with aggressive maneuvers in cluttered GNSS-denied environments require fast, reliable, and accurate UAV state estimation. In this paper, we present an approach for onboard state estimation of a high-speed UAV using a monocular RGB camera and an IMU. Our approach fuses data from Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO), an onboard landmark-based camera measurement system, and an IMU to produce an accurate state estimate. Using onboard measurement data, we estimate and compensate for VIO drift through a novel mathematical drift model. State-of-the-art approaches often rely on more complex hardware (e.g., stereo cameras or rangefinders) and use uncorrected drifting VIO velocities, orientation, and angular rates, leading to errors during fast maneuvers. In contrast, our method corrects all VIO states (position, orientation, linear and angular velocity), resulting in accurate state estimation even during rapid and dynamic motion. Our approach was thoroughly validated through 1600 simulations and numerous real-world experiments. Furthermore, we applied the proposed method in the A2RL Drone Racing Challenge 2025, where our team advanced to the final four out of 210 teams and earned a medal.

cs.RO↗